Masters Of War

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks. You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly. Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain. You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion' As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud. You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins. How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you That even Jesus would never Forgive what you do. Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul. And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand over your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.------- Bob Dylan 1963

Monday, February 29, 2016

In his inaugural remarks in January 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt looked out at the nation and this is what he saw.

He saw tens of millions of its citizens denied the basic necessities of life.

He saw millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hung over them day by day. He saw millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children. He saw millions lacking the means to buy the products they needed and by their poverty and lack of disposable income denying employment to many other millions. He saw one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

And he acted. Against the ferocious opposition of the ruling class of his day, people he called economic royalists, Roosevelt implemented a series of programs that put millions of people back to work, took them out of poverty, and restored their faith in government. He redefined the relationship of the federal government to the people of our country. He combatted cynicism, fear, and despair. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed the country.

Despite being an icon for many liberals and an anathema to the Republican right, former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s positions on the Middle East have more closely resembled those of the latter than the former. Her hawkish views go well beyond her strident support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent occupation and counter-insurgency war. From Afghanistan to Western Sahara, she has advocated for military solutions to complex political problems, backed authoritarian allies and occupying armies, dismissed war crimes, and opposed political involvement by the United Nations and its agencies. TIME magazine’s Michael Crowley aptly summed up her State Department record in 2014:

As Secretary of State, Clinton backed a bold escalation of the Afghanistan war. She pressed Obama to arm the Syrian rebels, and later endorsed airstrikes against the Assad regime. She backed intervention in Libya, and her State Department helped enable Obama’s expansion of lethal drone strikes. In fact, Clinton may have been the administration’s most reliable advocate for military action. On at least three crucial issues—Afghanistan, Libya, and the bin Laden raid—Clinton took a more aggressive line than [Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates, a Bush-appointed Republican................................

Her even more hawkish record during her eight years in the Senate, when she was not constrained by President Barack Obama’s more cautious foreign policy, led to strong criticism from progressive Democrats and played a major role in her unexpected defeat in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries.

After stepping down from the helm of the State Department in early 2013, she made a concerted effort to distance herself from Obama’s Middle East policies, which—despite including the bombing of no less than seven countries in the greater region—she argues have not been aggressive enough. It is not surprising, therefore, that the prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan, in examining the prospects of her becoming commander-in-chief, exclaimed to the New York Times in 2014, “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy.” He elaborated by noting that “if she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue, it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that. They are going to call it something else.” The same New York Times article noted how neoconservatives are “aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

4th Quarter and Full Year Earnings Reports

you might recall that last week we wrote about a new report from Deloitte auditors that forecast that more than a third of oil producers are probably heading for bankruptcy this year unless oil prices recover sharply, as they're no longer able to raise additional cash to pay their debts...they see that as many as 175 companies in the exploration and exploitation business, which have a combined total of more than $150 billion in debt, are likely to be heading for bankruptcy restructuring before the year is out....at the same time, past few weeks have seen the release of most of the 4th quarter and annual reports to shareholders for the oil majors & the independent drillers, which provide us a window into the financial condition of each of those companies...while we're not corporate analysts capable of determining which of them are in real trouble, we can take a look at some of those financial statements and at least get a sense of which are in the worst trouble by that metric, and whether their losses are becoming severe enough to shut them down or not....we'll start by looking at some of the vertically integrated major oil companies, who also have downstream oil refining and product marketing operations, and are likely to see that profitable side of their business make up for the losses on the exploration and exploitation side...

The latest EIA Oil Stats

US crude oil production was modestly lower again this week, but our imports of crude remained elevated and our refining pace slowed, and as a result our stores of crude oil rose to another new record... this week's Energy Information Administration data showed our field production of crude oil fell by 33,000 barrels per day, from 9,135,000 barrels per day during the week ending February 12th to 9,102,000 barrels per day during the week ending February 19th...that was 2.0% below the 9,285,000 barrels per day we were producing in the third week of February last year, and except for three weeks in September and October at 9,096,000 barrels per day, the lowest our oil production has been since November 2014, so it seems low prices are finally taking a toll on what our domestic oil companies are willing to bring up from the ground.....

meanwhile, our crude oil imports, the other major source of our domestic crude supply, slipped to an average of 7,802,000 barrels per day during the week ending February 19th, falling by 117,000 barrels per day from the average of 7,919,000 barrels per day we imported during the week ending February 12th...while this week's imports were 7.2% above the 7,279,000 barrels per day we were importing during the week ending February 20th last year, imports are too volatile on a weekly basis for such a comparison to give us a good sense of the year over year change, so the weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) reports a 4 week moving average of imports, which showed our oil imports have averaged 7.8 million barrels per day over the last 4 weeks, 7.0% above the same four-week period last year...

however, even with domestic supply thus down a bit from last week, refineries also slowed down during the period, processing 15,685,000 barrels per day during the week ending February 19th, 163,000 barrels per day fewer than the previous week’s average, as the US refinery utilization rate fell to 87.3%, down from the 88.3% refinery utilization rate during the week of the 12th, and down from a refinery utilization rate as high as 94.5% at the end of November..in the same week a year ago, refineries processed 15,243,000 barrels per day, using 87.4% of the country's refining capacity, so such a slowdown is fairly normal for this time of year, as refiners are beginning the process of switching over to their summer blends...

but even with less crude being refined, our refinery production of gasoline rose by 334,000 barrels per day to 10,009,000 barrels per day during week ending February 19th, 3.6% more than the 9,659,000 barrel per day gasoline production of the week ending February 20th last year, and only the 6th time in history our gasoline output topped the 10 million barrels per day threshold....meanwhile, our output of distillate fuels (ie, diesel fuel and heat oil) fell by 225,000 barrels per day to 4,438,000 barrels per day during week ending the 19th, which was also down by 309,000 barrels per day from our distillates production during the same week a year ago...however, even with the increase in gasoline production, there was an even larger increase of 373,000 barrels per day in demand for that product, and as a result we saw the first drop in our supply of gasoline in storage in 15 weeks, as our gasoline stockpiles fell by 2,236,000 barrels from last week's record high to 256,457,000 barrels as of February 19th...that was still 6.9% higher than the 240,014,000 barrels we had stored at the same time last year, and, except for last week, the largest gasoline stores we've ever accumulated in the recent history tracked by the EIA...during the same week, our distillate fuel inventories also fell, decreasing by 1,669,000 barrels to a total of 160,715,000 barrels as of February 19th.....but because of the mild winter, our stocks of distillates remain above the upper limit of the average range for this time of year, measuring 28.9% higher than the 124,698,000 barrels we had stored during the same week last year..

so, while we didn't have new records for stored gasoline or any other refinery products, the ongoing level of excess crude imports combined with less refining did leave a lot of unused oil sloshing around in the Gulf Coast states, and as a result our stocks of crude oil in storage, not counting what's in the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve, rose once again to a new record of 507,607,000 barrels as of February 19th, up by another 3.5 million barrels from the record 504,105,000 barrels we had stored at the end of the prior week...as we've pointed out repeatedly, the crude we have stored now is far more than we've ever had stored in the 80 years of EIA record keeping, which first saw the 400 million barrel level breached in the 3rd week of January last year...for a visual of that, we'll include a picture of the most recent 15 years of the interactive graph that is included with the EIA tables on our weekly crude oil supply:

This Week's Rig Count

for the first time in 4 weeks, cutbacks in working drilling rigs were less than 5% of the preceding week's active rig tally ...Baker Hughes reported that the number of active drilling rigs working in the US fell by just 12 to 502 rigs as of February 26th, down from the 1267 rigs that were drilling for oil or gas in the same week a year ago, and down from the recent rig count peak of 1931 rigs that were being worked on September 26th of 2014....13 rigs that had been drilling for oil were shut down this week, leaving 400, down from the 986 oil rigs that were deployed on February 27th last year, and down from the fracking era high of 1609 oil drilling rigs that were working on October 10, 2014...but even with natural gas prices at a 17 year low, someone out there added a rig to drill for it, as gas rigs were up by 1 to 102 for the week, still down from the 280 gas rigs that were working a year ago...

likewise, rigs on 2 additional oil platforms started drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, bringing the active Gulf total back up to 27...that's still down from 49 drillers in the Gulf and a total of 51 rigs working offshore a year ago, but with the long lead time on such drilling, this count has been holding steady in the mid 20s range for several months now...otherwise, both horizontal and directional rig counts decreased, while vertical rigs were up by 8 to 58, which was still down from 194 vertical rigs that were in use on February 27th of 2015...a net of 19 horizontal rigs were stacked this week, leaving 397, down from the 946 horizontal rigs that were working in the US the same week a year ago, and down from the recent high of 1372 horizontal frackers that were drilling on November 21st of 2014...in addition, the week's directional rig count fell by 1 to 47, down from the 127 directional rigs that were in use a year ago....

of the major shale basins, the Eagle Ford of south Texas saw 7 rigs pulled out this week; leaving the Eagle Ford with 47 rigs, down from 157 a year earlier...in addition, the Arkoma Woodford of Oklahoma, the Granite Wash of the Oklahoma-Texas panhandle region, the Haynesville of Louisiana, the Permian of west Texas and the Utica of Ohio all had one rig pulled out; those reductions left Arkoma Woodford with 4 rigs, down from 5 rigs last week and a year ago, left the Granite Wash with 9 rigs, down from 34 a year ago, left the Haynesville with 14 rigs, down from 40 on the same weekend last year, left the Permian with 164, down from last February 27th's 355 Permian rigs, and left the Utica with 12 rigs, down from 38 rigs in the Utica last year at this time...meanwhile, 3 rigs were added in the Cana Woodford of west central Oklahoma, bringing the total count there up to 36, still down from 39 a year earlier, and a rig was added in the Barnett shale, which underlies the Dallas -Ft Worth area of Texas, where there are now 4 rigs, down from 9 a year ago...

the state count tables show Texas with 5 fewer rigs, down from 236 last week and down from 570 a year ago; New Mexico shed 3 rigs, and now has 18 rigs, down from the 68 that were deployed in the state a year ago...both Alaska and California were down 2 rigs this week; the former is now down to 11 from 12 rigs a year ago, while the latter is now down to 6 rigs from 15 a year earlier....there were also single rig reductions in Ohio, Utah, and Wyoming; Ohio now has 12 rigs, down from 36 a year ago; Wyoming has 9 rigs running, down from 33 a year earlier, whereas Utah is now completely rig free, with all 11 rigs running there a year ago now gone...still, Louisiana saw the addition of the 2 rigs in their Gulf of Mexico waters, bringing the state count up to 47, still down from 102 a year ago, while single rigs were also added in West Virginia and Kentucky...West Virginia now has 13 rigs, down from 16 last year, while Kentucky shows 2 rigs drilling, the same number that were drilling in Kentucky on February 27th of 2015...

You like what Bernie’s calling for, but you just don’t think he’s likely to win the general election, perhaps because “this country would never elect a socialist.” And even if he did win, you don’t think he’d be able to accomplish his goals, given how entrenched the GOP opposition is. Maybe you even think it’s already settled—that Hillary’s got the nomination locked up.

Here’s why going with that assumption—and backing Hillary in general—would be, in the words of Donald Trump, a disaster.

Contrary to conventional pundit wisdom, Hillary is not the stronger general-election candidate.

So far Clinton seems to have retained the status of favorite for the Democratic nomination. But there are strong signs that it’s Sanders who would fare better against the eventual GOP nominee.

Recent polling shows Sanders doing better than Clinton against each of the Republican contenders. One can question the relevance of early-stage matchups such as these, but as Princeton’s Matt Karp recently noted in his eye-opening pieceon Sanders and Clinton’s comparative electability: READ MORE

Friday, February 26, 2016

The fossil fuel industry’s business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductions—causing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world’s addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.

As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.

America’s unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.

As the New York Times reported in a Dec. 8, 2015 front page story, ISIS political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention which, they know from experience, will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America............................

The crash in oil prices has taken its toll. The number of active oil-drilling rigs in the U.S. is plunging toward the lowest level in more than 75 years of records. The animation below shows the deployment of oil and gas rigs over five years, culminating in the collapse of almost 75 percent of the rig count.SEE IT HERE THIS IS AMAZING

Legend has it that Kurds will never be united because they’d rather be bickering among themselves; Kurds taught me that, in Turkey, Iraq and Syria. The Americans have been manipulating Iraqi Kurds at will since 1991. Now the top instrumentalizer/demonizer of Kurdish hopes and dreams – across the Turkey/Syria front – is neo-Ottoman Sultan Erdogan.

Ankara used to conduct an ersatz «peace process» with Anatolian Kurds. Erdogan replaced it by all-out war, spilled over against Syrian Kurds. The war is not against all Kurds, of course, but mostly those of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK, whose leader, Abdullah Ocalan, is serving a life sentence at Imrali prison) and their allies, the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD)..........................

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Exclusive: Hillary Clinton’s cozy ties to Washington’s powerful neocons have paid off with the endorsement of Robert Kagan, one of the most influential neocons. But it also should raise questions among Democrats about what kind of foreign policy a President Hillary Clinton would pursue, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Prominent neocon Robert Kagan has endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president, saying she represents the best hope for saving the United States from populist billionaire Donald Trump, who has repudiated the neoconservative cause of U.S. military interventions in line with Israel’s interests.

In a Washington Post op-ed published on Thursday, Kagan excoriated the Republican Party for creating the conditions for Trump’s rise and then asked, “So what to do now? The Republicans’ creation will soon be let loose on the land, leaving to others the job the party failed to carry out.”

Then referring to himself, he added, “For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The [Republican] party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.”

While many of Kagan’s observations about the Republican tolerance – and even encouragement – of bigotry are correct, the fact that a leading neocon, a co-founder of the infamous Project for the New American Century, has endorsed Clinton raises questions for Democrats who have so far given the former New York senator and Secretary of State mostly a pass on her pro-interventionist policies.

..........................Fourteen years after September 11, 2001, the historical rupture produced by the events of that day has transformed a terrorist attack into a war on terror that mimics the very crimes it pledged to eliminate. The script is now familiar: security trumped civil liberties as shared fears replaced any sense of shared responsibilities. Under Bush and Cheney, the government lied to the American public about the war in Iraq and manipulated the justice system in order to impose anti-terrorist laws that violate civil liberties. The Bush administration used a state of emergency to turn the United States into a torture state, rolling out a range of terrorist practices around the globe, including extraordinary rendition and state torture.But it is Obama who has become the master of permanent war, seeking to increase the bloated military budget - close to a trillion dollars - while "turning to lawless violence…translated into unrestrained violent interventions from Libya to Syria and back to Iraq," including an attempt "to expand the war on ISIS in Syria and possibly send more heavy weapons to its client government in Ukraine."Obama has not only expanded the reach of the militarized state, but hascolluded with Democratic and Republican Party extremists in preaching a notion of security rooted in personal fears rather than rallying collective strengths against the deprivations and suffering produced by war, poverty, racism, and injustice.United in their efforts to wage war abroad, both political parties have made it easier at home to undermine those basic civil liberties that protect individuals against invasive and potentially repressive government actions............................READ MORE

Rudyard Kipling poem. Written in 1917, the poem commemorates the Indian and British troops who died in an ill-conceived and poorly administered campaign to wrest control of Mesopotamia from Ottoman Turkey.

Mesopotamia

They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slainIn sight of help denied from day to day:But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,Are they too strong and wise to put away?

Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide—Never while the bars of sunset hold.But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?When the storm is ended shall we findHow softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to powerBy the favour and contrivance of their kind?

Even while they soothe us, while they promise large amends,Even while they make a show of fear,Do they call upon their debtors, and take counsel with their friends,To conform and re-establish each career?

Their lives cannot repay us—their death could not undo—The shame that they have laid upon our race.But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,Shall we leave it unabated in its place?

New Records for Gasoline and Crude Oil Stores, and Why Oil Output is Holding Up

this week's stats from the US Energy Information Administration, delayed until Thursday because of the Monday holiday, showed that our supplies of crude oil and gasoline in storage have again both risen to new record levels, as our oil imports rose, our oil production slipped, and refineries increased their consumption of crude for the first time this year...as usual, the major reason for the increase in oil inventories this week was a big jump in our imports of crude oil, which rose by 795,000 barrels per day to average 7,919,000 barrels per day during the week ending February 12th, up from an average of 7,124,000 barrels per day during the week ending February 5th...while that was 11.5% higher than the 7,105,000 barrels per day of oil we imported during the 2nd week of February a year ago, oil imports are notoriously volatile week to week (as one VLCC tanker can be carrying more than 2 million barrels), so the EIA's weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) reports imports as a 4 week moving average...that EIA report showed that our crude oil imports averaged over 7.7 million barrels per day over the last 4 weeks, 5.8% above the same four-week period last year...

at the same time, EIA data showed our field production of crude oil fell by 51,000 barrels per day, from 9,186,000 barrels per day during the week ending February 5th to 9,135,000 barrels per day during the week ending February 12th...that was our largest drop in crude output since the second week of October and leaves our crude production 1.6% below the 9,280,000 barrels per day we were producing in the second week of February last year, although it remains on a par with the oil production figures we saw in September and October...recall that last week we showed long and short terms graphs of our oil production, which showed that our domestic oil production rose from around 5 million barrels per day before fracking, to top 9 million barrels per day last November, where it has held fairly steady since, despite the fact that the number of new wells being drilled has dropped by more than 70%...this week a series of graphs from the EIA were posted at several oil sites around the web which go a long way to explain that apparent anomaly, so we'll include them here and explain what they mean..

Bakken crude oil output per well daily by month of production:

the above graphic, and the three below, all come from the EIA's monthly Drilling Productivity Report, and they are all constructed in the same manner; each graph has 10 production graph lines within it, one for each year since 2007, and a grey line for pre-2007 production, for each of the major 4 oil producing basins tracked monthly by the EIA...each annual line then shows the average production of fracked wells for that given year for each month that oil wells started that year have been in operation...thus in the graphic above for the Bakken, the lightest yellow line shows the average production record of all Bakken wells that were fracked and began producing oil in 2007; following along that line, we can see that in the first month 2007 wells began to produce, their output averaged 150 barrels of oil per day; by the time the 2007 wells were 12 months old, their production dropped to 75 barrels per day, and by the time they were 24 months old, their production had slipped to 50 barrels per day...go out to the end of that light yellow 2007 line, and we see that production of those 2007 wels had slipped to 30 barrels per day by the 60th month of operation, and presumably continues to deplete further to this day...(NB: my numbers are estimates; the data was not supplied)

if we then look at the 2008 line, we see considerable improvement from 2007; wells started that year produced 250 barrels per day the first month, were still producing 125 barrels per day by the 12th month, 80 barrels per day in the 24th month, and were still producing nearly 50 barrels per day after 5 years had passed....production per newly fracked Bakken well then got incrementally better each year until 2015, when new wells were producing 440 barrels per day when first fracked, and still around 180 barrels per day 10 months later...so with that introduction to what these graphs show us, we'll include the similar graphs for each of the other major producing shale basins below, and then see what we can glean from them about the past year's - and future - oil production..

Eagle Ford crude oil output per well daily by month of production:

Niobrara crude oil output per well daily by month of production:

Permian crude oil output per well daily by month of production:

one observation that should be immediately obvious from just glancing at this set of charts is that the new wells that started producing this year have been more productive, sometimes considerably so, than the ones that started producing in 2014, which were in turn more productive than those fracked in 2013...for instance, the first month of production for 2013 wells in the Bakken was 320 barrels per day, it was then about 370 barrels per day for wells completed in 2014, and then rose to 440 barrels per day for wells brought on in 2015; for the Eagle Ford, the first month yielded an average of 320 barrels per day for 2013 wells, 370 barrels per day for 2014 wells, and 420 barrels per day for last year’s wells; for the Niobrara, the first month yielded a 125 barrels per day average for 2013 wells, 170 barrels per day for 2014 wells, and 220 barrels per day for 2015 wells, and for the Permian, charted directly above, the first month averaged less than 100 barrels per day for 2013 wells, rose to 155 barrels per day for 2014 wells, and 230 barrels per day for wells completed last year...the reasons for the increases vary; crews are becoming more experienced at what they need to do to get an optimum yield, efficiencies in the methods continue to be introduced, and many frackers are now drilling and fracking longer laterals, obviously increasing the area fracked and hence the wells output...but what is pretty clear is that for these 4 major basins, less producing wells have been producing more, thus maintaining their total level of output...

since about 5 million barrels per day of our national 9 million plus barrels per day oil production is now from horizontally drilled and fracked wells, this increased production from each well that's brought on goes a long in explaining why our oil output has not fallen off more, despite the drop in the number of rigs actually drilling for oil from 1609 in October of 2014 to under 450 working rigs recently; every well that went into production this year was producing much more than the ones from prior years which were being slowly depleted...considering the fact that since the fracking operation, which initiates the oil flow, costs twice to three times as much as drilling the well, many companies actively manage their inventory of drilled wells and hold off on fracking until they can contract to sell the expected oil production at a suitable prices...a recent NY Times article puts the number of such drilled but uncompleted (DUCs) wells at 4,000 nationally, a figure consistent with other reports on DUCs i've seen from industry sources (ie, a December Rigzone article put the number of DUCs in the Permain alone at 2000)...the same NY Times article, focusing on Anadarko, says they began warehousing DUC wells and effectively storing oil underground since late 2014, when prices started tanking...it's reasonable to assume that other oil producers did the same; after all, who would want to blow the first few (& best) months of your fracked well production when oil prices have just gone in the tank?

the above chart, which we posted and explained last week, shows in blue the weekly volume of our oil output from September 2014 through the week ending February 5th, while below we have a current graph of contract oil futures prices over the same period...we can see that the first drop in a 5 year run-up of our oil production from 5 million barrels per day to 9 million barrels per day started in March, when oil prices were at their lowest...then shortly after oil prices moved back up into the $60 a barrel range, oil production spiked to a new record high ('unexpectedly' to everyone writing about it then)...it appears that the $60 a barrel price was just enough to get producers to complete some of their DUC wells, a large number of which appear to have started production during the last two weeks of May, producing the spike we see on the crude chart above, and leading to the record production we saw in the week ending June 5th...then as oil prices tanked again in July, fewer new wells were brought on, and hence production fell back to the 9.1 to 9.2 million barrels per day range we saw in September and October, as that initial surge we saw in the production graph tapered off...

what we can draw from this observation is that should oil prices rise towards $60 again, a large number of those 4,000 DUC wells will likely be completed (ie, fracked) and they'll start producing...as our production charts show, oil production in the first month after fracking has been averaging between 220 barrels per day per well and 440 barrels per day per well....should oil prices spike, then, it's certainly possible we could see an incremental increase in production of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 barrels per day, on top of what we're already producing...to put that amount into perspective, the threat by Iran that they'd be adding a half million barrels per day to the global oil glut is what caused oil prices to tank this winter, so it's possible US producers could easily add a similar amount themselves, should they start fracking their backlog…of course, that would only exacerbate the glut, and hence drive prices down again...thus, absent an agreement between Russia and OPEC to actually cut oil production (or a war in the middle east, which is always possible), $60 a barrel, or whatever price it takes to bring the DUC wells to completion, certainly looks like a ceiling for oil prices for some time to come...

to return to our weekly data, this week's reports showed that refinery processing of crude oil rose for the first time since the week ending December 25th, as US refineries used 15,848,000 barrels per day during the week ending February 12th, 338,000 barrels per day more than the 15,510,000 barrels per day they processed during the week ending February 5th, as the US refinery utilization rate also rose for the first time this year, from 86.1% in the week of the 5th to 88.3% of their operable capacity last week...our gasoline production rose again, from 9,553,000 barrels per day during week ending February 5th to 9,675,000 barrels of gasoline per day during week ending February 12th, 5.4% more than the 9,180,000 barrels per day gasoline production of a year earlier, and again the most gasoline we've produced in a week since December...likewise, our output of distillate fuels (ie, diesel fuel and heat oil) rose by 306,000 barrels per day to 4,663,000 barrels per day during week ending the 12th, which was also 34,000 barrels per day higher than our distillate production of the same week a year ago...

with the increase in production, unused supplies of both major refinery products also rose...our end of the week supply of gasoline in storage rose for the 14th week in a row, increasing from 255,657,000 barrels as of February 5th to a record 258,693,000 barrels as of February 12th....that was 6.4% more than the 243,132,000 barrels of gasoline that we had stored on February 13th last year, which was at that time a 15 year high for gasoline stores...likewise, our distillate fuel inventories also rose, increasing by by 1,399,000 barrels to 162,375,000 barrels, due to a combination of reduced demand for both heating and for oil field work, which itself is a major consumer of diesel fuel....while not a record, our distillate inventories are now nearly 35 million barrels, or 27.4% higher than the same week last year, and above the upper limit of their average range for this time of year...and even with the pickup in refining, however, we still had another 2,147,000 new barrels of crude oil left unused at the end of the week, and hence that was added to our already nearly full storage tanks to set another new record for our stocks of crude oil in storage, which rose to 504,105,000 barrels at the end of the week...our crude oil glut has been setting records like that on and off since January 30th of last year, when we first topped 400 million barrels of oil in storage for the first time in the EIA records...

This Week's Rig Count

the past week again saw another large percentage drop in the number of rigs drilling in the US, as it's clear that virtually no one in the oil and gas business can break even with $30 oil and sub $2 natural gas...Baker Hughes reported that their count of active drilling rigs fell by 27 over the past week to 514 rigs as of February 19th...that's down from the 1310 rigs that were drilling for oil or gas in the same week a year ago, and down from the recent rig count peak of 1931 rigs that were being worked on September 26th of 2014....another 26 rigs that had been drilling for oil were pulled out this week, leaving 413, down from the 1019 oil rigs that were deployed on February 20th last year, and down from the fracking era high of 1609 oil drilling rigs that were working on October 10, 2014...gas rigs were down by 1 for the week, leaving 101 gas rigs still drilling on February 19th, down from 289 gas rigs that were working a year earlier, and down from the 356 gas rigs that were deployed on November 11th, 2014...

17 more horizontal rigs were stacked this week, after 25 were stacked last week and 29 were stacked the week before that, cutting the count of active horizontal rigs down to 416, which was down from the 979 horizontal rigs that were deployed the same week last year, and down from the recent high of 1372 horizontal frackers that were drilling on November 21st of 2014....in addition, 9 vertical rigs were taken out of service, leaving 50 on February 19th, down from the 203 vertical rigs that were deployed at the end of the 3rd week of February a year ago... and a single directional rig was also pulled out, leaving 48, down from the 128 directional rigs that were in use last February 20th...

of the major shale basins, the large Permian basin of west Texas and eastern New Mexico once again saw the greatest reduction, as 7 more rigs were idled there, still leaving 165 rigs still drilling there, which was still down from 362 rigs working in the Permian a year earlier...in addition, the Eagle Ford of south Texas saw 4 rigs pulled out; that left the Eagle Ford with 54 rigs, down from 160 a year earlier...the Williston basin of North Dakota had 3 rigs pulled out and stacked this week, leaving the Williston with 36 rigs, down from 123 a year ago and down from 220 rigs at the Bakken peak...2 rigs were removed from both the DJ-Niobrara of the Rockies front range and the Mississippian of southwest Kansas and bordering states; that left the DJ-Niobrara with 16 rigs, down from 39 a year earlier, and the Mississippian shale with 8 rigs, down from 48 a year earlier...single rigs were pulled out of the Cana Woodford of Oklahoma and the Barnett Shale of the Dallas-Ft Worth area; that left the Cana Woodford with 33, down from 43 a year earlier, and left the Barnett with 3 rigs, down from 11 rigs on February 20th of 2015...and someone decided to push their luck and added 2 rigs in the Granite Wash of the Oklahoma-Texas panhandle region; that brought the Granite Wash back up to 10 rigs, which was still down from the 36 rigs drilling in the Granite Wash on the same weekend a year ago..

the Baker Hughes state count tables show that Texas got rid of a net 12 rigs, still leaving 236 in the state as of the 19th, down from the 576 rigs that were deployed in Texas a year earlier...North Dakota saw 3 rigs pulled this week, leaving 36, down from 119 a year ago...Louisiana and Mississippi both had 2 rigs idled this week; those reductions left Louisiana with 45 rigs, down from 109 a year earlier, and Mississippi with one rig still drilling, down from 7 on February 20th of 2015...finally, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wyoming each saw one rig pulled out this week; that left Colorado with 19 rigs, down from the 47 rigs that were drilling there a year ago, left Kansas with 7 rigs, down from the 18 deployed in the state a year earlier, left Nebraska with 1 rig, down from 3 rigs a year ago, left New Mexico with 21 rigs, down from 72 a year earlier, and left Wyoming with 10 active rigs, down from the 35 rigs deployed in Wyoming last February 20th...

NB: links to other oil patch related stories from the past week can be found here

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